"I didn't quite know what to expect from this interview," confesses Jason Reitman. The multi-award winning 32-year old writer and director may be secure in his ability to produce great movies, but he admits to being "scared" at the prospect of being interrogated by SuicideGirls.

It's taken us over a month to tie Jason down, during which time we've been communicating directly by Twitter and via his film and personal publicists. He's very much in demand right now. His first two movies, Thank You For Smoking, a satire about the inner machinations of the tobacco industry, and Juno, a dark comedy about teen pregnancy written by longtime friend of SG Diablo Cody, left indelible marks on the moviemaking landscape. Both films were unabashedly quirky, yet each achieved mainstream critical and commercial acclaim -- and more importantly sparked a dialog about their respective subjects that reached far beyond the confines of the entertainment world. It's perhaps this capacity to make us think and to spark meaningful discussion that is Jason's greatest gift.

Though Jason grew up very much within the Hollywood machine (Jason's dad Ivan Reitman produced and/or directed an impressively long list of titles which includes the beloved Animal House, Ghostbusters and Beethoven franchises), creatively he's always preferred to walk the less traveled path. Intelligent and idiosyncratic, his latest comedy, Up In The Air, is no exception. Starring George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizer who chooses air-miles over attachment and celebrates his solitary existence, the film (which features real-world characters cast from the ranks of the recently downsized) ultimately takes flight on a path that our Hollywood-trained brains may instinctively resist. However, with a nod to Jason's libertarian leanings, the choice is right for Ryan Bingham, and that's what counts.

Though Up In The Air has just gone on wide release today, it's already been nominated for six Golden Globes, more than any other film in the class of 2009. Consequently Jason's press commitments have just got a whole lot crazier. To compound the pressure on his already over-filled schedule, he's just returned from a trip to his Canadian homeland, where he and his dad (who co-produced Up In The Air) were honored with turns carrying the Winter Olympic flame.

We finally caught up with Jason mid-afternoon on Monday as he was heading over to a satellite studio for a live remote appearance on the Faux News show Happy Hour. Once on the phone, Jason was beyond generous with his time, and over the course of two phone calls, one before and one after his TV appearance, we talked about the new movie, his affinity with its leading character, and a few other topics that only SG would dare to bring up.

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

Jason Reitman: I am in Los Angeles, calling from my car. I'm sorry that I'm calling in from my car.

NP: That is quite alright. I'm happy to be taking with you. I know that you've been a bit of a busy boy. I've been following your Twitter account, all the places you've been flying to and from. You also tweeted about SuicideGirls covering the movie, and you wrote about how you always wondered what happened behind our door.

JR: Yeah. My trailer company is across the hall from that door with the skull and crossbones on it, if indeed that is your guys' office.

NP: It was. We've actually just moved, but up until November it was our office.

JR: Fair enough. It always kind of was a curiosity.

NP: I'm just wondering what was going on in your imagination behind that door. What was the movie in your mind like?

JR: That's interesting. Let me think about that for a second. That's an excellent question. Well obviously there's a lot of tattoo and piercing appreciation happening, and I imagine heavy satirical dialog being passed back and forth, and probably things that I don't even want to say out loud.

NP: In one of your tweets on the subject you somehow thought we'd be chastising you for being "a VERY bad director."

JR: Yes, yes. Well I can't help but in my mind create linkage between -- I'm like blushing -- between the whole SuicideGirls' culture and perhaps the S&M crowd.

NP: And somehow, in the movie that's going on in your mind, Jason Reitman is in the naughty boy punishment room?

JR: Yes, exactly. Well, I'm under the impression there is a naughty boy room. It's a large closet sized room within the SuicideGirls headquarters and that's where these girls take very conservative boys and chastise them. I would imagine my fear going into a meeting within the SuicideGirls headquarters would be similar to the fear I had meeting Diablo Cody for the first time.

NP: So there's no need to ask if you've been naughty or nice this Christmas, you're just expecting a lump of coal in your stocking?

JR: No. I'm nice. But I guess that would go along with the mythology for me, that no matter what I would say I would be perceived as naughty by the Suicide Girl...

[Break so Jason can go live on Faux News' Happy Hour.]

JR: Sorry about that.

NP: That's quite alright. How was Happy Hour for you?

JR: Really strange. Did you actually watch that?

NP: I just saw a brief clip of it then had to run back upstairs because the TV's in another room.

JR: It's strange to do those live interviews where you're talking directly to a camera. You don't see who you're talking to and it's hard to build a rhythm because you're working with a little earpiece in your ear. And then you get asked a question about healthcare reform and it's like there's no good way to answer this question. I'm not going to weigh in on healthcare.

NP: Especially on a show called Happy Hour that's based in a bar.

JR: Right. Exactly. I mean look, I applaud them for trying to take politics down to a low-key kind of conversation. We have too little of that. We have too much arguing and too little conversation, so that's kind of cool. But, you know, there's something dark and insidious about all the cable news networks.

[Returning to our previous topic of conversation.]

I though about it a little more. I'm trying to imagine what's going on behind the doors of the SuicideGirls. And yeah, I think it's girls dressed like an American Apparel ad billboard gone wrong, intermittently having political conversations and making out with each other.

NP: Which is exactly how it is.

JR:See!!! Fuck!!!

NP: When I worked in that old office I'd be sat in a corner with my head down transcribing an interview. And because my office was the only room with a white wall, they'd do a lot of photography in there. I'd be completely involved in my own little world transcribing a heavy political interview with someone like Greg Palast, and then I'd look up and there'd be a naked girl standing on a box.

JR: [laughs]

NP: I don't know if you've seen that Flip Strip iPhone app where the girls are clothed and then you flip your iPhone upside down and their clothes fall off, well that was shot in my office.

JR: I'm going to make a very revealing admission here. I have both SuicideGirls' applications on my iPhone, although I've never played the second one, that one called Seduce [A SuicideGirl]. Because it's actually like a racy game and I find the only time I play my iPhone apps is on a plane and it doesn't seem like I can play that game on a plane...I think I would probably get in trouble, a marshal might actually tap me on the shoulder.

I remember David Cross used to do a whole bit about why do they sell pornographic magazines at the airport. Like is someone really buying Club Magazine, then bringing it on a plane and then leafing through it casually mid-flight?

NP: I think they could be going to the toilet mid-flight.

JR:Ooooh! Do you think that happens on planes?

NP: I'm sure it does. I had friends who worked as air hostesses and they would talk about that stuff all the time. They would just roll their eyes at the people who attempted to join the Mile High Club and would forget to do things like lock the bathroom door when they went in. And they'd laugh at how people would surreptitiously sneak up the isle one by one -- because obviously two people can't just troop into a toilet together, one person has to go in and then the other person has to sneak in. So they would watch these people and it would just be like comedy to them.

JR: You can't really sneak in. I think at this point if you wanna join the Mile High Club -- which I'm not a member of -- you probably just have to be ready for the admission that everyone's going to know exactly what you're doing.

You know it's funny, the scene in the movie where George and [his love/lust interest] Vera talk about that was a completely improvised scene. I realized that I needed to get them from this flirty conversation about their mileage cards up to the bedroom, and there just didn't seem to be enough connective tissue. They just didn't seem to have reached that flirtatious point in the conversation where they could just go up to the room. On the day of I said, "Hey, do you think we could do a little improv about how you need to join the Mile High Club?" We had a quick conversation about it, we set up two cameras looking at each of them so we could inter-cut the same shot, and they just went for it. It was just kind of amazing.

NP: From what I understand, the key is to do it in the toilets at the back of the plane because then at least people's heads are facing forward. Then you have to wait for the hostesses to be doing trolley service so there's none at the back of the plane watching the bathroom doors.

JR: Yeah, but the big question then is how do you leave to room? I guess once you're done you don't care. What are they going to do? Kick you off the plane at that point? So the point is, as long as you can get into the bathroom then you're fine.

NP: Yeah.

JR: And if you're really wealthy they now have these rooms, like Singapore Airlines and Emirates Airlines, they have actual rooms that you can have in first class. But then I guess there's no joy to that right? If you just buy your way in.

NP: Exactly. There's absolutely no sport to it.

It's funny, I was at the JPL open house [with my pal Heathervescent], and they were talking about Virgin Galactic's commercial flights into space. Some JPL scientist was saying he couldn't understand why folks would want to pay a fortune for the flights since they'll only allow time for about 15 minutes of weightlessness. He said it'd take 5 minutes to get up there and out of your harness, during which time approximately half of the tourists would get space sick, and that you'd only have about five minutes in zero gravity before you'd have to get back in your harness for re-entry. I explained to him that it was all about people wanting to join the 60-Mile High Club and have sex in space. The Mile High Club is not exclusive enough, it's all about the 60-Mile High Club.

JR: But what if you have performance anxiety and you only have five minutes?

NP: It'd be an expensive place to get performance anxiety.

JR: [laughs] You'd definitely want to pop a blue pill. You can't have any accidents up there.

NP: So Jason's tip for gravity-free flight is to remember to pack the blue pill?

JR: Pop a blue pill and pack the lube.

NP: [laughs] So I also noticed in an image you posted via Twitter that you conveniently condensed all the questions from your LA Up In The Air junket into an easy to use pie chart. I'm all about visual aids, and, since you've gone to the trouble of creating it, it'd be churlish of me not to make use of it. I therefore thought we should rattle through the top ten seemingly obligatory question topics with quick-fire word association-style responses so we can then move on to fresher ground. Does that work for you?

JR: That's fine. I mean it's actually a pie chart from all of my interviews, not just the LA junket. I've been doing interviews for about three months on this film, and it's a culmination of everything. So it's not only what the press of Los Angeles are interested in, but the press of the world.

NP: So the first one would be Clooney.

JR: Charm machine.

NP: Economy.

JR: Heartbreaking.

NP: Real people.

JR: This makes no sense, but what popped into my head was, "even better than the real thing."

NP: Project.

JR: What brought me to this project? Self-examination.

NP: Interesting, that goes into a question I have down the line. But back to the list, "Book."

JR: What attracted me to the book? Sitting right in front of me.

NP: Dad

JR: My hero.

NP: Anna / Vera.

JR: Two sides of the same coin.

NP: What's next?

JR: Labor Day.

NP: Miles.

JR: Embarrassing obsession.

NP: Technology.

JR: Love it / hate it.

NP: Going back to this idea of self examination, this film is very much in the same vein as Thank You For Smoking. Both films explore the dichotomy of how their respective super smart central characters justify their morally questionable career choices -- to themselves, their family, and the audience. They use their intellect and humor as a weapon against that which fundamentally is indefensible. I guess my first question is what draws you to these characters?

JR: Well I guess I don't find what they do fundamentally indefensible. I don't view these issues with levels of morality, I kind of feel they're just choices. I'm interested in the less favorably viewed choice. I like to take characters who have an open-minded point of view on an otherwise polarizing issue. And so issues like cigarettes, and teen pregnancy and abortion, and, not only corporate termination, but, even more so, the idea of living alone, are ideas where people have dead-set points of views. That really interests me, why people often think that they should tell other people what to think and how to act. I'm attracted to characters who kind of fight the party line.

NP: In interviews you've said that you see a lot of yourself in George Clooney's character. On the surface you've spoken about how it's because you fly a lot, but I guess underneath that there is something deeper than that going on....George's character, and the character in Thank You For Not Smoking, they do have morally questionable careers. Is there a part of you that sees being a Hollywood director as something less than noble?

JR: No. I think you're on the right track but the wrong road. At the end of the day I actually don't see anything wrong with what those guys do for a living. For me it's more a question of how do you simultaneously have those values and be that open-minded, but also be a parent or a member of a community. For Thank You For Smoking, the big question for me was how do you be a libertarian -- I consider myself a libertarian -- and a father at the same time. It's hard to have a heart and be a libertarian, and yet that's exactly how I consider myself. I consider myself to be tentative and have a big heart but also to have fairly cold libertarian views, so they just kind of clash.

Juno for me dealt with the idea [of] when do you decide to grow up? So hidden within this film that seems to be about teen pregnancy and adoption for me is a movie about the moment that you decide to grow up. And me, as the guy who directed it, I think I was 29 or 30 when I directed it and I had just become a father, that was kind of a big deal.

With this new one, hidden within a film that seems to be about corporate termination and the economy is a movie about the decision whether to be alone or not. Being alone is kind of a controversial idea in this society, and it's certainly something I deal with all the time. Even though I'm certainly a rooted person by Hollywood standards -- I'm a father, I'm a husband earlier than most in this industry, I have kind of a close-knit family -- I still daydream about waking up in a city where I know nobody and have nothing, and I consider that to be a fairly dark side of me.

I supposed that's the beauty of making films. I get to explore different lives and that's one of the reasons I do it for a living. Every two years I get to make a new movie and I get to put on a new set of clothes. I get to see what it would be like to be a libertarian lobbyist living in DC. I get to see what it would be like to be not only Juno, but one of the Lorings in Juno. In this movie I get to see what it would be like if I actually never settled down. If I just lived by my daily itinerary what would happen. And in that I get to almost apologize for the darkest parts of my psyche.

It's funny, I watched Nine the musical last night and there's a great scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis [who plays Guido Contini, a character which is based on the Italian playboy / director Federico Fellini] and Marion Cotillard [who plays Guido's wife, Luisa Contini] have a great conversation about this exact thing; That as a director you strangely get to apologize for the darker parts of your brain through your movies, and I think I do that.

NP: Also, and this is what Nine explores too, the world excuses you because you're an artist. The world excuses you for your darker behavior and peccadilloes because it's acceptable as an artist.

JR: Right. And for me it's not, you know, for being a roving philanderer or alcoholic. For me it's more for the deep recesses of my mind, and the sheer amount of being absent that happens because of my passion for filmmaking.

NP: You talk about Juno being about the point the character decides to grow up, but the crux of this movie is that moment when you finally think Clooney's character is going to choose the emotionally mature option. He has a choice of growing up and becoming an emotional adult or continuing on his previous course. Is there a part of that which applies to you in that Hollywood allows you to be a permanent child?

JR: Yeah, certainly. That kind of permeates the industry. Although strangely, even though my films seem to across the board examine this behavior, I am kind of a notable exception to the rule. I was born an old man, and that's something that everyone seems to know about me. That would be the wonderful juxtaposition between Diablo and I, that she will die a young soul and I was born an old man.

NP: You talk about the film being a reflection of the guilt that you feel being absent from your family because of your filmmaking...For me, one of pleasures I feel being up in the air is that it's the one time you can have your phone switched off guilt-free and for the most part you're disconnected from the internet. It's the one place you can switch off and disconnect from the world. I can imagine you have such a high-pressure career, and the pressure of being a family man too, so airports and airplanes must be somewhat of a sanctuary for you.

JR: Yeah, it's funny, that's originally the reason I started going to movie theaters. I started going to the movies because that was one of the few places I could disconnect from the world. At a certain point, because of cell phones, they stopped being that way, but airplanes continue to be that way. It is the one place in the world where you can break free of everything and live un-tethered, where no one can reach you, and you can kind of be whomever you want. You sit next to a stranger and you have the kind of conversation that you would never have with someone you knew well. You learn about professions and ways of life that you otherwise would never hear about, and you sometimes open up and say things that you wouldn't say to someone you know well.

NP: I'm not looking forward to the time when all economy seats have web access as standard. That's just going to make an airplane an extension of the office, and that's going to change flying.

JR: That's happened. It's done. I mean, this is the last year of flying without internet that's pervasive. You know, half the flights at this point have it, within a year all of them will. And you're right, it will be a sad moment because it is the last place where you talk to strangers. And there's something exciting about talking to strangers. I love being surrounded by strangers. I love going to Coachella alone and walking amongst strangers. I like sitting on planes and starting conversations with people I know nothing about, knowing that there's sort of a strange time limit on our relationship, and that's going to go away. It's almost done.

NP: When I interviewed Diablo Cody, she spoke about how at some point she'd like to see "an extreme directors cut" of Jennifer's Body [a film which Reitman co-produced but didn't direct]. She said the movie was originally "longer, looser, weirder, more ambiguous." Are there any scenes in Up In The Air you regret losing that you had to cut for whatever reason?

JR: On Up In The Air I had final cut, and even on the previous two films I basically had final cut. I'm a big believer in tight movies. I don't like any extra fat on them. I don't like anything that breaks up the rhythm or the tone. I think the best directors cut of all time is the Cohen brother's Blood Simple where they actually made the movie shorter.

The Up In The Air DVD will have all the extra scenes and it has the directors commentary on why I deleted those scenes. I think perhaps there is one moment, and it's four lines of dialog that I really questioned whether or not I should take out, and that's the only one. It was a little personal character moment. But no, I don't think you'll see two and a half hour director's cuts of my movies. That's just not how I think as a director.

NP: Out of interest, what were the four lines?

JR: It was George Clooney talking to his sister Kara, played by Amy Morton. They had just gone to the rehearsal dinner of their younger sister, played by Melanie Lynskey, and they're about to go to sleep. They're just about to walk into their hotel rooms when George says to Amy, "Can you believe she's getting married, she's just a kid." And Amy goes, "Actually she's 37-years old. She's just squeaking by." And that was it. I loved that line. I thought it was unusual and ballsy, and the kind of thing you don't see in other movies. It spoke to the pressure on women in their late thirties, the kind of identity crisis that women go through. It was the kind of line that enough people asked me [about] when they read the script that it was just dangerous enough to be great. The only reason I lost it was that we were just in that wedding sequence a little too long, that was about it.

NP: If looking back on this movie that's the only area that you have ambiguous thoughts about, you must be pretty damn pleased with this movie.

JR: [laughs] Well you know I make very quick decisions and I don't really re-think them much. I make a decision and I move on. I think that's part of what makes me a good director. I don't over think things, at least on films. I may over think in real life, but on my films I make quick decisions and I move on, and I don't regret them.

NP: You're Canadian. Are you still a green carder or have you done the U.S. citizenship thing?

JR: I'm a green card. I will give up the right to vote as long as I don't have to do jury duty.

NP: Is that due to your libertarian leanings or about the inconvenience factor?

JR: Pure inconvenience. I work every day of the year and the idea of not being able to work for a week is just terrifying to me. And honestly, I think as a voter I would just get frustrated.

NP: I hear you. One final question, you carried the torch in the pre-Olympics ceremony, and indeed it was your director father that passed the torch on to you, which has all sorts of metaphorical connotations. If that was a scene in a movie my eyes would be rolling with the clumsiness of the heavy symbolism.

JR: Yeah, and I'm asked so much about it and there really is nothing I can say more than it is what it is. My father's passed the torch to me in life and he's passed the torch now literally and there's no metaphor, there's nothing I can add that will bring any more relevance to that.

NP: Did it spark any internal thoughts, or any kind of discussion between you and your dad?

JR: No. It didn't create any conversation about torch-passing. All it really created was a conversation about how fortunate we are to be sharing this moment together. So often fathers and sons just don't even get along, whereas he's my hero. That we get to share this moment in our work life together, and after decades of having exhaustive conversations about filmmaking to actually make a movie together, for it to be successful and then in that same year for us to carry the torch for our country and feel that Canadian simultaneously, it was a moment that left us both in tears. There's no words to describe how prideful I think we both felt.

NP: Well congratulations to both of you.

JR: Hey, thank you very much. Have a very happy and healthy 2010, and let the rest of the folks at SuicideGirls know that I continue to be a big fan.

"I didn't quite know what to expect from this interview," confesses Jason Reitman. The multi-award winning 32-year old writer and director may be secure in his ability to produce great movies, but he admits to being "scared" at the prospect...